UK council bridges enterprise with document management

Workers in the Surrey County (UK) Council's Environment Consultancy Division (ECD) are sharing information and collaborating on county transportation projects using document management technology.

The ECD's 120 staff provides planning, engineering, quantity surveying, and highway design service and upkeep for the county's 2,000 bridges and structures and 400 traffic signal installations.

Government workers now scan images of engineering drawings of structures such as highway bridges as well as associated reports and correspondence into an Altris EB document management system.

In the future ECD plans to load electronic documents and digital photographs instead of just the images.

With the new system ECD staff will access and manage engineering drawings much more efficiently, contributing to the Council’s overall aim of avoiding critical and irreversible environmental damage, according to Surrey Council IT & business manager Leigh Atkinson.

After an initial rollout to ten users, the system will be expanded to include several hundred ECD employees.

The system uses an NT application server for desktop PCs, and runs Oracle on a HP UNIX platform.

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